“Do I have to go this weekend?” he asked one night.
“Why?” I said.
He shrugged.
“I just don’t like it there.”
“What don’t you like?”
He picked at his sleeve.
“It smells different,” he said finally. “And Dad’s always on his phone.”
I nodded slowly.
“Okay,” I said. “We’ll figure it out.”
I didn’t promise anything. Not yet.
Meanwhile, Scott got louder. Not in the house. In everything else. Phone calls in the driveway. Conversations he didn’t bother lowering his voice for.
“I’m telling you, it’s basically done,” I heard him say one afternoon, pacing outside. “She signed everything. It’s clean.”
Clean.
I wrote that word down later.
A few days after that, I got another piece. It wasn’t dramatic. Just careless. Scott had always been the one to handle taxes. He liked it that way, said it was more efficient. But sometimes he’d ask me to print things. Old habits. He sent something to the house printer by mistake. I heard it start up while I was in the kitchen, that whirring sound, paper sliding out. I walked over and picked it up. A draft. Partial financial report. Not complete. Not final. But enough. Numbers that didn’t match what he’d claimed in the divorce paperwork. Not by a little. By a lot. I stood there holding it, feeling the weight of it settle. Not excitement. Not even satisfaction. Just confirmation.
When I showed it to Marcia, she didn’t react right away. She read through it once, then again, then she set it down very carefully.
“Did he give this to you?” she asked.
“No. It printed by mistake.”
She nodded.
“Okay.”
That word again. But this time there was something under it.
“This helps,” she said.
“How much?”
“Enough to matter.”
She tapped the page lightly.
“Especially if he repeats any of this under oath.”
I leaned forward.
“You think he will?”
She gave a small, knowing look.
“He thinks he’s already won,” she said. “People like that don’t prepare. They perform.”
That night, I sat in the living room. The quiet felt different now. Less empty. More focused. I looked at Scott’s chair again, still in the same spot, untouched. I walked over and rested my hand on the back of it. Cold leather, worn in just the places his body had shaped it over the years. For a second, I thought about everything tied to that chair. Every night he sat there while I moved around him, cooking, cleaning, managing everything else. And how normal it had all felt at the time. I stepped back.
Not yet, I thought.
The second weekend the kids went with him, I didn’t walk around the house. I stayed at the kitchen table, papers spread out, laptop open, everything lined up. Not messy. Clear. I went over the timeline again, checked the dates, matched the transfers, verified the connections. No guessing. No assumptions. Just facts.
Sunday night, when the kids came home, Ellie went straight upstairs. Didn’t say much. Ben came into the kitchen.
“Can I have cereal?” he asked.
“It’s nine at night,” I said.
“I know.”
I poured it anyway. He sat at the table eating quietly. Then he looked up.
“Mom?”
“Yeah?”
“Are we moving?”
I paused.
“Not right now,” I said.
He nodded.
“Okay.”
That was it. He went back to eating, and I realized something. Scott was planning a future, talking about it like it was already decided, but nothing had actually been decided yet. Not by anyone who mattered.
The following week, Marcia called me.
“We have a date,” she said.
“For what?”
“Preliminary hearing. Custody and financial disclosures.”
“When?”
“In two weeks.”
Two weeks. The same timeline Scott had thrown out like it was a done deal. I sat down slowly.
“Okay,” I said.
“Dana,” she added, “we’re not going in there to argue.”
“What are we doing?”
“We’re going in there to listen.”
I frowned slightly.
